With the introduction of the internet, art has changed from being something communicated face to face by humans to now face to screen. Youtube, Instagram, Internet Webpages, and now Large Language Models are the primary methods to which humans interact with humans or computers.

Whether this is leading to downfall of our soceity or not is an interesting debate, but not one that will be solved here.

This passage is focused on personal websites, why make them? Are they valuable to society? Does it offer something to the person who creates them? These are all great questions!

Are They Valuable to Society?

This is a difficult question to gauge, but I think the place we can start is looking into the website’s enviormental impact (the quantifiable negative cost society will bear).

The Cost

In order to calculate the CO2 a page uses the poieple over at Website Carbon made a free online calculator: https://www.websitecarbon.com/website/danielsbrown3-github-io-writing/ .

Here is a quick overview of how they determine the carbon footprint of the site:

1. Data transfer over wire
   • Energy used is roughly proportional to the amount of data transferred (adjustments made for users that cache website)
2. Energy intensity of web data from data center and infrastructure
   • Average of energy used by data center, telecom network, and end user computer to deliver the page
3. Carbon intensity of electricity
   • Based on international average for grid electricity
4. Website traffic
   • Multiple carbon per page view

How much carbon does my site produce? 0.07 g

Comparing to a popular LLM website from Anthropics Claude.ai which produces, 1.67 g

My website produces much less per user visit.

Estimating that 10 people view my site a month (being generous lol), my site uses enough energy every year to pop 8 million bubbles or boil 1 cup of tea a year.

So if thats the cost, whats the benefit?

The Benefit

Sharing ideas and growing as a person. I think for me personally, in order to gauge whether I’m progressing in a certain field, it is useful to document my journey along the way. I can’t speak for other people’s expierence, but when I view other people’s personal websites who are in a similair field as me I am able to learn new things and avoid simple mistakes.

For example:

https://eugeneyan.com/prototyping/

Eugene Yan is a popular Machine Learning voice that stores most of his ideas, prototypes, and knowledge journies in his personal website.

Much of human based progression can be attributed to sharing ideas and building off ideas of others and making them better. In computer science, this has been a great accelerator of the industry as tools like Github, stack overflow, and now LLMs allow individual contributers to “stand on the shoulders of giants” and work with virtually millions of people across the globe at the same time.

What Are My Goals for the Site?

Now that we discussed the pros and cons of communicating ideas through the internet, what is my goal for this website? How can I produce enough benefit to outweight the enviomental cost of 8 million bubble pops a year?

1. Improve my writing
   • With an increasing dependence on Large Langauge Models to produce written text and supply frameworks for thinking, my brain is starting to gain cobwebs and rust. This webpage will server as an excercise bike for my writing and analyzing skills.
2. Improve my communication skills
   • Communicating to one another and understanding people emotionally, I believe is what makes us human. This site will allow me to organize my ideas such that when I do communicate with people I can do so more effectively because I’ve already organized my ideas once before.
3. Increase the time I spend thinking on topics
   • Similairly to the rapid expansion of LLMs and AI, the amount of content to learn and projects to complete is increasing exponentially. But our time remains finite. So focusing that time and specific targetted task that produce the most important output is important.
4. Hopefully help others
   • This site will most likely be riddled with mistakes and terrible errors (I’m sure I’ve already butchered most of the grammar on this page), but if people can see my errors and not reproduce them, that is a big plus.

The key is connecting.